November 14, 2016

One of the fastest-growing applications for artificial intelligence is extracting business information from the Web. Crayon, founded in 2014, lets clients specify companies to follow and then sends a real-time feed of over 100 types of information including price and message changes, new products, and online reviews. Crayon says it has 42,000 users for its free and paid products. It just raised $3.35 million, bringing total funding to $5.1 million.

A survey from Sapient Nitro and the Martech Conference found that 55% of marketing technologists have a marketing or business background while just 21% have a technical degree. As Scott Brinker points out in his analysis, many people holding the title may be operators of CRM or marketing automation systems, not the martech planning overlords of legend. Supporting this view: “enterprise architecture/tech selection & lifecycle management” ranked 13th on the group’s list of important technology skills. Top categories were operational knowledge including CRM systems, analytics, and Web design.

Japanese tech giant Fujitsu has announced a technology-plus-consulting offering to support real time marketing through data integration. The “eXperience Data Platform” (XDP) is built around the Tealium customer data platform, which ingests data from Web, CRM, call center, inventory, and other systems; consolidates and loads it into a customer database; and makes the information available for analysis and marketing programs across all channels. For the moment, it’s available only in Japan.

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